October 16, 2002

First the travel saga … I went back to the US embassy yesterday and they were like “of course you can’t travel on an expired greencard! Who told you that you could?” and I was like “You did! Well, not you personally but another one of your people did – him!” And they simply nodded and said “Oh yeah … sorry … it doesn’t work that way” I was getting mad by this time but decided to keep my cool since I still needed to travel. So I spoke to them a bit more and they tell me that the only way I could get into the US would be if I handed in my greencard voluntarily since then they would “consider” issuing me a temporary travel visa. I was a bit taken aback by the word “consider” but decided to go ahead since I seemed to have no other choice. I did the needful and surprise of surprises, they were pretty good about the rest of the stuff and issued me a temporary visa without the usual hassles – not even the usual interview that goes along before they grant a visa. Of course, this is just one step in the next cycle of the journey – guess we’ll see how it goes …

A Blog user who prefers to remain anonymous has been kind enough to purchase a registered copy of PlusMemo. Thanks to him, the nag dialog which pops up each time you run Blog will disappear with the next release. I was so excited that I told him that I would do a new release as soon as I had the registered copy of PlusMemo but then I realized that I’d packed up all the source and stuff in anticipation of my trip and that I didn’t have anything to work on. So you’ll have to be patient with me till I can sort out my travel stuff and get settled back into work. But I do thank our anonymous benefactor for doing something which I am sure a lot of you are going to appreciate. Not only that, this one copy of PlusMemo will remove nag screens from several of my other freeware apps including Cee and the as yet unreleased PostMan e-mail client :p

Duane Brosius wrote to me yesterday and had a couple of interesting suggestions – one about Blog and one about the Blog community 🙂 The one about Blog was a feature to automate the sidebars that a lot of us seem to have on our sites. His suggestion was to have a set of internal text variables which could be assigned different values and these could be used in the sidebar. I couldn’t see the difference between having the text variables and putting the sidebar values directly into the template itself except for ease of maintenance and being able to switch sidebars easily (if you constantly switch sidebars that is …) and so asked Duane to explain it to me more to see if this idea is viable. Any useful input that anybody else may have on the idea is welcome since while I might not see it, this might be a feature that could be useful to many …

Duane’s other idea was that I introduce the people that I talk about here in my journal because somebody new to Blog would not know who I was talking about – he meant the “regulars” in the Blog community :p I think it’s a good idea but besides linking to their site (if I know of it ..) I wouldn’t know how to introduce the people I talk of since I basically mention anybody who’s written to me with something that I think is worth writing about here in the journal. Yes, there are a few like Tyran and Nigel that I mention often and I guess it kind of confuses people when I say something about them without giving the background but then again, I probably mentioned it somewhere in the past and so think I shouldn’t mention it again – of course, that doesn’t help the person who’s just started reading my journal … Hmm … I see why writers of sequels have such problems :p Any ideas on this issue? I appreciate all feedback, comments 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 6:19 am  |  6 Comments